Leaving Behind a Legacy of Love

A true life is a life in which we abandon our private desires and
live for the public good. This is a truth taught by all major
religious leaders past and present, East and West, whether it
be Jesus, Buddha, or the Prophet Mohammed. It is a truth that is so
widely known that, sadly, it seems to have been devalued. The passage
of time or changes in the world cannot diminish the value of this truth.
This is because the essence of human life never changes, even in the
midst of rapid change all around the world.
The teacher with whom we have the closest relationship is our
heart. Our heart is more precious to us than our closest friends and
even more precious than our parents. So, as we live our lives, we
need periodically to ask our hearts, “Am I living a good life now?”
Anyone can hear his heart speaking to him. If he comes to the
realization that his heart is his master, he “polishes” his heart and
maintains a close relationship with his heart throughout his life. If a
person hears the sound of his heart tearfully sobbing, then he needs
to stop immediately whatever he is doing. Anything that makes the
heart suffer will ruin him. Anything that makes the heart sad will
eventually make the person fall into sadness.
For a person to polish his heart to the point that it becomes as clear
as crystal, he absolutely must spend time in direct conversation with
his heart in an environment where he is away from the world and alone
with his heart. It will be a time of intense loneliness, but the moment
that we become close to our hearts is the time of prayer and meditation.
It is a time when we can take ownership over our hearts. When we
isolate ourselves from the noise around us and allow our thoughts to
settle, we can see into the deepest parts of our hearts. It will take a lot of
time and effort to go all the way down to where the heart has settled. It
will not happen in a day.
Just as love is not for our own sake, so happiness and peace are not
for ourselves. Just as love can never exist without a partner, happiness
and peace cannot exist without a partner. All these can exist only in the
context of a relationship with a partner. Nothing can be accomplished if
we love alone. We cannot be happy alone or speak of peace alone. Since
a partner is what enables us to have happiness and peace, the partner is
more important than we are.
Think about a mother carrying a baby on her back, sitting at an
entrance to the subway, selling homemade snacks to the people passing
by. To be at that spot in time for the morning rush hour, she will have
spent the whole night preparing the snacks and put her fussing child on
her back to come to the station. People passing by might say, “Oh, you
could get along well if only you didn’t have that child to care for,” but it
is for the sake of the child that the mother lives her life. The child on her
back is the mother’s lifeline.
Today people can expect to live about eighty years. Eighty years of
joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, and all the other emotions mixed together
may seem like a long time. But if we take away the private time that
a person spends sleeping, working, and eating, and then the time we
spend talking, laughing, and having fun with family members and
friends, attending weddings and funerals, and time spent lying sick in
bed, only about seven years will remain. A person may live eighty years
but only spend about seven years living for the public good.
Life is like a rubber band. The same seven years, given to two different
people, can either be spent as seven years or as seventy. Time,
by itself, is empty. We need to put things in it. The same is true about a
person’s life. Everyone wants to live his life with a comfortable place to
sleep and good things to eat. Eating and sleeping, however, are simply
ways of letting time slip by. In the moment that a person has lived out
his life and his body is laid to rest in the ground, all wealth and glory
become nothing more than a bubble and disappear at once. Only the
seven years that he lived for the public good will remain and be remembered
by posterity. Those seven years are the trace that is left in the
world of a life that lasted eighty years.
We do not come into this world, or depart from it, of our own accord.
We have no ability to make choices with regard to our fate. We
are born, though we did not choose to be born. We live, though we did
not choose to live. We die, though we do not choose to die. We have
no authority over these aspects of our lives, so how can we boast that
we are somehow better than others? We cannot be born by our own
wish, possess things that will forever be our own, or avoid death. So any
boasting on our part would only be pathetic.
Even if we rise to a position higher than others, the honor is only temporary.
Even if we gather more possessions than others, we must leave
them all behind at the gates of death. Money, honor, and knowledge all
flow away from us in time, and all disappear with the passing years. No
matter how noble and great a person might be, his is nothing more than a
pitiable life that will end the moment he loses hold of his lifeline.
Human beings have always struggled to understand who we are and
why we must live. We must realize that, just as we were not born of our own
accord, so also we are not meant to live our lives for our own sakes.
So the answer to the question of how we should live our lives is simple.
We were born of love, so we must live by traveling the path of love. Our
lives were created by receiving the boundless love of our parents, so we
must live our entire lives repaying that love. In the course of our lives,
this is the only value we can choose on our own. The success or failure
of our lives depends on how much love we are able to pack into those
eighty years that are given to us.
At some point, everyone will shed his physical body like old clothing
and die. In Korean, “to return” is a common expression for dying. To
return means to go back to where we came from, that is, to go back to
our fundamental roots. Everything in the universe moves in cycles. The
white snow that collects on the mountains will melt and flow down the
slopes, first forming streams and then a river, and eventually go into
the ocean. The water that flows into the ocean will absorb the heat of
the sun’s rays, become water vapor, go back up into the sky, and prepare
to become either snowflakes or drops of rain. To return to our original
place in this way is what we call death. Then, where do we human beings
return to when we die? Body and heart come together to bring
about human life, and death is the act of shedding the body. So we go to
the place from which the heart came.
We cannot talk about life without also talking about death. We must
accurately understand what death is, even if we do so only to understand
the purpose of life. The type of life that has true value can be
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. true families create true people .
understood only by the person who finds himself in a difficult situation
when death appears imminent and he cries out to Heaven in desperation,
pleading to be allowed to live even just one more day. If our days
are as precious as this, how should we live them? What are the things we
must accomplish before we cross over the boundary line of death?
The most important is not to commit sin and live a life that is without
shadows. There is much religious and philosophical debate over what
constitutes sin, but what is clear is that we should not engage in acts that
give pause to our conscience. When we do things that give us a guilty
conscience, it always leaves a shadow in our heart.
The next most important thing is to resolve to do significantly more
work than others have done. All of our lives are limited, whether that
limit is sixty years, seventy years, or some other time period. Depending
on how we use that time, we can live a life that is two or three times
more abundant than others. If you cut your time into segments and
then live each segment in a meaningful way, your life will be truly precious.
Live your life with an attitude of devotion and diligence, telling
yourself, for example, that you will plant two or three trees in the time
it takes others to plant one. Do not live for yourself. You must live not
for yourself but for others; not for your family but for your neighbors;
not for your own country but for the world. All sin in the world comes
about when the individual is put first. Individual desires and ambitions
harm a person’s neighbors and ruin the society at large.
Everything in the world will eventually pass. The parents we love,
the husband or wife we love, and the children we love will all pass away.
All that remains with us at the end of our lives is death. When a person
dies, only his legacy remains. Please consider for a moment what you
can do to show that you lived a life of value. The possessions and social
position you have accumulated during your life will pass away from
you. Once you cross the river of death, such things will have no meaning.
Because we were born in love and lived our lives in love, love is
also the only thing that remains with us when we are in our graves. We
receive our lives in love, live by sharing love, and return into the midst
of love. It is important that we live our lives in a way that we can leave a
legacy of love behind us.

True Love Is Found in True Families

No matter how much a man and woman may love each other,
a complete and happy family must have parents who act as a
protective shield around the home, and there must be least
one child for the parents to love. When a family is protected, it becomes
a nesting place for happiness. Even a person with great success in society
will have an unhappy family if this protection collapses.
The basis of love is the heart that sacrifices everything for the sake of
the other. The reason parental love is true love is that parents are willing
to give everything to their children, and when they have given everything,
they want to give even more. Parents who love their children do
not even remember what they have given. No parent would keep track
of all the shoes and clothes he bought for his child and say, “This is how
much I spent on you.” Instead, a parent gives everything he has and says,
“I wish I could do more for you than I have, and I’m sorry that I cannot.”
As a child, I would follow my father around as he tended to his bee
colonies, and I saw how the bees behaved. When a bee flying around a
flower garden caught the fragrance of a flower, it would place its legs
firmly on the flower. It would then stick its nose deep into the flower, so
that its rear end was pointing upward while it sucked up the nectar. If
you grabbed the bee on its rear end, it would not let go of the flower. It
risks its life to keep its hold on the flower.
The love of parents cultivating a family is like the honeybee attached
to the flower. Even if a parent should lose his own life, he will never let
go of the bond of love that ties him to his child. Parents will lay down
their lives for the sake of the child and then later forget that they had
done so. This is the true love of parents. No matter how far or dangerous
the path may be, the parent will gladly travel it. Parental love is the
greatest love in the world.
A person can live in a wonderful house and eat exotic foods from the
mountains and the oceans, but if he has no parents, there will be a large
void in his heart. A person who has grown up without receiving parental
love has a loneliness and emptiness in his heart that cannot be filled with
anything else. The family is the place where we receive true love and learn
true love. Children who do not receive true love when they are young live
their entire lives hungering for love and suffer emotional pain. Not only
that, they don’t have the opportunity to learn the lofty moral duties that
they must fulfill for the family and society. True love is a value that cannot
be learned any place other than in the family.
A true family is a place where a husband and wife each love the
other and live for the sake of the other, as if the spouse were his or her
mother, father, or sibling. It is a place where the husband loves his wife
as he loves God, and the wife respects her husband as she respects God.
We cannot forsake our siblings, no matter the difficulties we my face.
Neither can we forsake our mothers. So the term divorce cannot even
exist. The husband is in the place of the father and older brother to
the wife. Just as a wife could never forsake her father or older brother,
she can never forsake her husband. In the same way, a husband could
never forsake his wife. A true family is a place where each spouse lives
with the acknowledgment of the absolute value of the partner. It doesn’t
matter if a husband and wife come from different races or cultures. If
they have formed a family after having received God’s love, then there
can be no conflicts of culture among the children born into this family.
These children will love and value the culture and tradition of their
mother’s country and father’s country with the same love they have for
each parent. Resolving conflicts in multicultural families is not a matter
of providing them with particular knowledge. Instead, it is a matter
of the parents of these families raising their children in true love. The
parents’ love soaks its way into the flesh and bone of the children and
becomes the fertilizer that enables the children to accept their mother’s
country and father’s country as one and become wonderful citizens of
the world.
The family is the school where love for humanity is taught and
learned. When children who are raised in the warm love of their parents
go out into the world, they will care for people in difficulty in the manner
they learned in their home. People raised in loving relationships
with their own brothers and sisters will go into society and share their
caring hearts with their neighbors. People raised in love will look upon
each person they meet in the world as a member of their own family.
The starting point toward a true family is the heart of love that treats
strangers as family and shares with them.
Another reason the family is important is that it expands to become
the world. A true family is the basis for forming a true society, true
nation, and true world. It is the starting point toward a world of peace
that is God’s Kingdom. Parents will work for their children until their
bones melt way. They are not working just to feed their own children,
however. A person whose heart overflows with love is capable of working
for the sake of others and God.
The family is where we receive so much love that it overflows from
our hearts. The family protects its members in its embrace, but its function
is not to prevent love from getting out. In fact, the love in the family
should overflow into the surrounding community. No matter how
much love may overflow, the love in the family will never go dry. This is
because it is received from God. The love we receive from God is such
that we can continue to dig it out but never see the bottom. In fact, the
more we dig, the more love wells up like pure springwater. Anyone who
has been raised in this love can lead a true life.

The True Meaning of Marriage

International and intercultural marriages are the quickest way to
bring about an ideal world of peace. Things that would take seemingly
forever can be accomplished like miracles through these
types of marriages in just two or three generations. People should
marry across national and cultural boundaries with people from countries
they consider to be their enemies so that the world of peace can
come that much more quickly. A person may hate people from a certain
country or culture and think he never wants to set eyes on them. But
if someone from that country becomes his spouse, then the person is
halfway to becoming a person of the new country. All the hatred melts
away. If this is repeated for two or three generations, the roots of hatred
can be eliminated.
White and black people will marry each other; Japanese will marry
Koreans and people from Africa. Many millions are entering into such
international and intercultural marriages. A completely new lineage is
being created as a result. A new kind of human being that transcends
white, black, and yellow is being born. I am not just referring to marriages
across international boundaries. The same is true for marrying
people from other religions or denominations. In fact, marriages
between people of different religions are even more difficult than international
marriages. Even if two religious groups have been fighting
each other for centuries, it is possible to bring harmony between them
by having their followers marry each other. In such a marriage, one
spouse will not close himself off from the other just because she was
raised in a different tradition.
It is most important to teach young people about the sanctity and
value of marriage. Korea today has one of the lowest birthrates in
the world. Not to have children is dangerous. There is no future for a
country that has no descendants. I teach young people that they should
remain sexually pure during their youth, receive the marriage Blessing,
and then have at least three children. Children are blessings given to us
by God. When we bear children and raise them, we are raising citizens
of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is why it is a great sin to live immorally
and to abort babies conceived in this lifestyle.
We marry not for ourselves but for the sake of our partners. When
looking for a spouse, it is wrong to look only for a beautiful person or
for a person living well. Human beings must live for the sake of each
other. We should apply this principle to marriage, too. No matter how
uneducated or homely your prospective spouse may be, you should
marry with a heart that you will love him or her even more than if the
spouse were educated and beautiful. God’s love is the most precious of
all blessings. In marriage, we receive that blessing of love and put it into
practice in our own lives. We must understand this precious meaning of
marriage, conduct our lives in marriage in the context of true love, and
bring about true families.
World peace is not such a huge undertaking. It takes peaceful families
to create peaceful societies and eliminate conflict among countries.
This will lead to world peace. This shows the importance of families
that are intact and the immense responsibility such families must
bear. The thinking that says “It’s enough that I live well and that my
family lives well” is completely alien to me.
Marriage is not something that involves just the bride and
groom. Marriage creates a relationship between two families, and
it brings reconciliation between clans and countries. Each accepts
the other’s different culture and overcomes the resentment and
hatred built up through history. When a Korean and Japanese
marry, it contributes to reconciliation between the two countries;
when a white person and a black person marry, it contributes
to reconciliation between the two races. The children of such
marriages represent harmony because they inherit the lineage
of two races. They represent a new beginning for humanity that
transcends the races. When this continues for a few generations,
division and hostility among nations, races, and religions will
disappear, and humankind will become one family living in a
world of peace.
In recent years, more and more Koreans are marrying foreigners,
and we see more families with people from different nationalities
and religions. Koreans have even coined a phrase for it that
means multicultural families. It is not easy for a man and woman
who have been raised in different cultures to create a family and
live with love for each other. Particularly in Korea, which traditionally
has had a homogeneous culture, the partners in such marriages
need to make extra effort to understand and care for each other. The
reason our members who enter into international and intercultural
marriages succeed is because they live together centering on God.
Various social welfare groups in Korea try to encourage the success
of multicultural families by offering programs that teach Korean
language and culture. Such efforts will be useless, however, unless our
concept of marriage changes. Whoever thinks, “Why did I marry this
man? If I hadn’t married this man, I would have had a better life,” is
setting the tone for a marriage that will be hell. Coming to a correct
understanding of marriage is more important than learning Korean
language and culture.
Marriage is not a simple matter of a man and woman of marriageable
age coming together and combining their two lives. Marriage is something
built on the basis of sacrifice. The man must live for the sake of the
woman, and the woman for the sake of the man. As you continue to live
for the sake of your spouse, your selfish mind disappears completely.
The heart that seeks to sacrifice this way is the heart of love. Love is not
a man and woman meeting each other and having a good time. Love is
offering up your life. If you marry, you must do so on the basis of your
determination that your life is for your spouse.

Ten Years of Tears Melt a Father-in-Law’s Heart

Not long ago the Korean media carried a story about a Japanese
woman living in Milyang, Korea, who received an
award for her filial service to her family. The article said
that the woman had come to Korea as the wife of a Korean man who
had met her through an introduction by a certain religious group
and married her despite opposition from his family. The Japanese
wife had cared for her Korean mother-in-law, who had difficulty moving
around, and her aged father-in-law with great devotion. The people
in the community then recommended her to be recognized for her filial